Duncan’s Cook Book

Limited Edition

Duncan wants to cook.

Mostly he wants to eat cake.

Not ordinary cake, but ice-cream cake.

I have no problem with that, except making ice-cream cake is not really cooking. We are going to make an ice-cream cake and more.

I thought we could begin to cook using every category: appetizers, entrees, salads, drinks, desserts.  He took a book and began our project, numbering the pages and making a table of contents. 

Table of Contents

That was about all of the cooking he wanted to do for the day.

But in a few hours we were back at the project, trying to put together something from the ingredients we already had at hand.

We watched a utube video on the perfect banana smoothie.

Who would have known that we were to find bananas with a small brown fleck on the skin – sweeter for our drink? As well we had to dig into the backs of the cupboard to find a blender, and learn how to assemble it.

Recipe: banana, ice, mango pulp, a dash of cocoa ... yum

The only hitch in our cooking came when I got involved. I told him that it would be easy to slip the ice we had crush out of the bowl and back into the blender. Duncan was right on this count which led to me having to make an apology – since I was wrong. Bonnie has been teaching me the new model of saying “I’m sorry.” I am not that good at the form,, yet. I think I have to describe what I did wrong, say I am sorry, and ask the person how I can make restitution. And then I have to perform that act. Bonnie says that she has to look for ways to model this for David.

Unfortunately, making mistakes often, I will not have to look far. In this case I said, “I am sorry I spilled your ice on the floor. You were right and I was wrong. How can I make up for it.”

Duncan hasn’t been taught the theory of this form of saying I am sorry, but he was quick to say, “Well, I will feel better if you clean up the mess than if I do.” Later I was to understand it was just not the mess of the ice on the floor, but the mess of all of the utensils we used while making the smoothie. So ... cooking lesson number one is complete.  And restitution lesson number one has been practised.

Here's to becoming a good cook.  Cheers!

The only unhappy person is Alex, whose ice we used up. I am not going to ask if I can make making restitution in this case – at least until tomorrow when I can go to the store and pick up some ice.

Astutely, he wants to know already why I didn’t think to ask myself before I used it, “Might someone else want some ice today.”

Some questions just never enter my mind.

Arta